Point-of-capture archiving and editing of personal experiences from a mobile device

Personal experience computing is an emerging research area in computing support for capturing, archiving, and editing. This paper presents our design, implementation, and evaluation of a mobile authoring tool called mProducer that enables everyday users to effectively and efficiently perform archiving and editing at or immediately after the point-of-capture of digital personal experiences from their camera-equipped mobile devices. This point-of-capture capability is crucial to enable immediate sharing of digital personal experiences anytime, anywhere. For example, we have seen everyday people who used handheld camcorders to capture and report their personal, eye-witnessed experiences during the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack in New York (The September 11 Digital Archive. http://www.911digitalarchive.org/) With mProducer, they would be able to perform editing immediately after the point of capture, and then share these newsworthy, time-sensitive digital experiences on the Internet. To address the challenges in both user interface constraints and limited system resources on a mobile device, mProducer provides the following innovative system techniques and UI designs. (1) Keyframe-based editing UI enables everyday users to easily and efficiently edit recorded digital experiences from a mobile device using only key frames with the storyboard metaphor. (2) Storage constrained uploading (SCU) algorithm archives continuous multimedia data by uploading them to remote storage servers at the point of capture, so that it alleviates the problem of limited storage on a mobile device. (3) Sensor-assisted automated editing uses data from a GPS receiver and a tilt sensor attached to a mobile device to facilitate two manual editing steps at the point of capture: removal of blurry frames from hand-induced camera shaking, and content search via location-based content management. We have conducted user studies to evaluate mProducer. Results from the user studies have shown that mProducer scores high in user satisfaction in editing experience, editing quality, task performance time, ease of use, and ease of learning.